Computer Education World

In the “Building Packages” section earlier, we saw an example of using pear
package to build a release tarball. In this section, we go deeper into that pro-
cess. The component of the PEAR Installer that creates packages is called the
PEAR packager. When we refer to the PEAR packager in this section, know
that it is part of the installer.
 

Source Analysis
One of the things that the PEAR packager does is analyze PHP code to deter-
mine what dependencies it has, and what classes and functions it defines. It
does this both to ease dependency handling and to catch coding standard-
related problems. For example, if a package defines a class with a name that is
outside the package’s namespace, the packager issues an error.
 

MD5 Checksum Generation
To give the PEAR Installer a way to check that files in a package tarball are
intact, the PEAR packager calculates an MD5 checksum for each file. This
checksum is embedded in the tarball as an attribute to the <file> element,
for example:
<file role=”php” md5sum=”c2aa3b18afa22286e946aeed60b7233c”
name=”HelloWorld.php”/>
This is done automatically during packaging so the package.xml file does
not have to be updated every time a file is updated.

Package.xml Update
The package.xml file that is embedded in the package tarball is generated dur-
ing packaging. The results of the source analysis and MD5 checksum steps are
embedded in the new package.xml file. To illustrate this, the generated pack-
age.xml for our HelloWorld package looks like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″ ?>
<package version=”1.0″>
<name>HelloWorld</name>
<summary>Simple Hello World Package</summary>
<description>This package contains a class that simply prints
&quot;Hello, World!&quot;.</description>
<maintainers>
<maintainer>
<user>ssb</user>
<name>Stig S. Bakken</name>
<email>stig@php.net</email>
<role>lead</role>
</maintainer>
</maintainers>
<release>
<version>1.0</version>
<date>2003-02-24</date>
<license>PHP License</license>
<state>stable</state>
<notes>First production release.</notes>
<provides type=”class” name=”HelloWorld” />
<filelist>
<file role=”php” md5sum=”c2aa3b18afa22286e946aeed60b7233c”
name=”HelloWorld.php”/>
</filelist>
</release>
</package>
The lines that have changed are emphasized in bold. As you can see, the
source analysis found our HelloWorld class, and an MD5 checksum has been
created for HelloWorld.php.

Tarball Creation
Finally, the tarball is created. If your CLI version of PHP has zlib support
enabled, it will be compressed; if not, it will be a plain .tar file. PEAR works
without zlib enabled, but it adds some hassle for you during package creation,
and downloads takes much longer.

The file layout of the generated tarball is like this:
package.xml
HelloWorld-1.0/HelloWorld.php
HelloWorld-1.0/hello
HelloWorld-1.0/HelloWorld.phpt
The file layout inside the package is based on that in the source tree,
because that structure is used in the package.xml file.